Hacker News Reader

Comment by thoughtFrame | Hacker News Reader

I've only learned of the Good Ol' Days of the 90s from second hand sources, and I was in middle school throughout the aughts, so for me these periods are just a mirage of a better time. In high school I pursued reverse engineering and other stuff, so I could blissfully ignore the newer direction the industry was taking all the way until 2019.

But now I'm close to graduating university. Is there any kind of job where this kind of software is still more common? PHP web development, sysadmin work, writing systems software or native software, etc.

View on HN

My experience of programming as a Junior Software Engineer in the '90s was replacing inner loops with inline assembly, avoiding cache misses (keep your code in the L1 cache) and making sure your memory accesses stayed on one page. Nobody seems to care even in the slightest about this stuff anymore, and the abysmal performance of modern software shows it.

During the last 30 years, everyone's focus has drifted up the stack, to higher and higher levels of abstraction and higher and higher level languages, to the point where we are totally divorced from the electrons and realities of the underlying hardware.

Certain industries still care about this stuff. Some trading firms rely on performant systems which utilize strategies like what you described. Not everything is in hardware and it varies from place to place

There's a lot of places that care about performance now, but in many if them, instead of optimizing your own business logic, you would be building performant platforms so that others could build their own business logic on top of them, be it V8 or Unreal.

Honestly, I think that this separation of concerns makes much more sense.

For php you're probably best off learning a framework or two (zend, symfony, cake, laravel) which is drastically different than writing regular old php. WordPress devs are always in demand for contract type of work, but it's a grind for minimum pay unless you dominate a niche with a plugin.

Unfortunately sites like square and social media have taken over the small time web dev companies where you used to be able to get your hands dirty at all levels.

I'd probably look around at digital marketing companies. Your tech skills won't be "praised", because they favor creative over technical abilities. But they'll probably throw a wide range of technical problems at you and expect you to be "fullstack".

Heavy industry. Manufacturing, mining etc. This stuff isn't always in the flashiest locations and wfh is bad form in my experience, but it is certainly critical. There are all sorts of custom systems keeping track of (and tying together) high value physical processes.

Embedded. Things are getting fat and wide enough that you can apply all of that tech to an embedded system and, hopefully, no one will be any wiser that you've done so.

SOM-based development (system-on-module) in the embedded Linux world means that being able to productively pick and place the right software components is a highly sought after skill.

There is gold in them thar' repo's, especially if your shovel is a SOM and your mule is a functioning supply chain direct to the customer ..

> just a mirage of a better time

Don't fall into the "good ol' days" trap. There were more than enough problems/challenges/frustrations to go around back then too.

By good ol' days I meant that everything I've read about them tells me that set of problems and frustrations is better than what we have today, and software was actually made better by those circumstances.

Of course, I can fire up DOS, NeXTStep, or Windows XP and get to doing it on my own, or hack on open sourced codebases from the time, but the key component is the teams of people doing it, and the common wisdom that they had.

Rather than thinking it was heaven, it's a hell I'd prefer over our current one, so to speak.

Right I'm just saying that's not correct. It's easy to view history through a very positive lens...nostalgia (even nostalgia for something you did not personally experience) is a powerful drug.

I have a lot of nostalgia for writing BASIC and the feeling that I got the first time I learned about HTML4 tables and ASP.NET. But you could not pay me to return to those technologies.

There are plenty of legacy systems around that were developed like this and never moved on. Finding them might be tricky though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com